The GATErs' Blog GATE scholars sharing our learning with the world! 

Today we will use 3 Depth and Complexity icons to explore world water usage as we Think Like a Hydrologist…

You learn the difference between fresh and saline water and its distribution on Earth, as well as the very small percentage that is available for human uses. What percentage of Earth’s water do you think is fresh, and what percentage do you think is saline?  Examine the online maps of our world’s water (and related graphs) to visualize the quantities. 

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/freshwater-map.html

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/waterdistribution.html

Now we are going to look at the world’s water usage. Start with the first map showing the world land area as it changes to a population map.  What do you notice?  http://www.worldmapper.org/animations/wm01to02.html 

World Water Use

Finally, browse some of the other cartograms referring to water.  (Put water in the search box). What trends do you notice? http://www.worldmapper.org/results.php

On our first week of GATE class, we created circle maps to define ourselves in context.  I typed up all of our definitions and created the Wordle below.  A Wordle is a “word cloud” that gives more prominence to words that appear more frequently.  What trends do you notice??